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Re: Machine Learning and Dimensions and stuff


From: William Kupersanin <wkupersa () gmail com>
Date: Fri, 21 Nov 2014 16:19:52 -0500

The implications are though, that even if the adversary adapts, that the ML
analytic is forcing the adversary to operate in a smaller space to avoid
appearing anomalous. I consider anything that can shift the balance of cost
from the defender to the adversary to be wildly successful.

--Willie

On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 5:25 PM, Halvar Flake <HalVar () gmx de> wrote:

Hey all,

thanks for the link, and it is indeed a fun talk :-)

An important detail that many people in "machine learning for security" neglect
is that the vast majority
of ML algorithms were not designed for (and will not function well) in an
adversarial model. Normally,
one is trying to model an unknown statistical process based on past
observables; the concept that the
statistical process may adapt itself with the intent of fooling you isn't
really of interest when you try to
recognize faces / letters / cats / copyrighted content programmatically.

For entertainment, I think everyone that plays with statistics / curve
fitting / machine learning in our field
should have a look at two things:

    http://cvdazzle.com/ - people trying crazy makeup / hair styles to
screw with face detection.
    http://blaine-nelson.com/research/pubs/Huang-Joseph-AISec-2011 - a
riot of a paper that introduces "Adversarial Machine Learning"

This doesn't mean that you can't have huge successes temporarily using ML
/ curve fitting / statistics;
attackers haven't felt the need to adapt to anything but AV signatures
and DNS blacklisting yet, so relatively simple
ML will have big gains initially. I suspect, though, that a really
important part of using ML for defense in any form
is "not becoming an oracle" - which is often counter to commercial
success. It may be that the only good, long-term
ML-based defense is one that can't be bought.

Cheers,
Halvar




*Gesendet:* Donnerstag, 20. November 2014 um 19:16 Uhr
*Von:* "Dave Aitel" <dave () immunityinc com>
*An:* dailydave () lists immunityinc com
*Betreff:* [Dailydave] Machine Learning and Dimensions and stuff
https://vimeo.com/112322888

Dmitri pointed me at the above talk which is essentially a good
specialized 101-level lecture on how machine learning works in the
security space.

There's not much to criticize in the talk! (It has a lot of the features
of El Jefe!) They use a real graph database to run their algorithms
against process trees - but if you wanted to heckle you'd ask "Doesn't
the CreateProcess() system call also take "parent process" as an
argument? What IS the rate of false positives? Because if you can't get
it down to basically 0 then you are essentially wasting your time? etc." :>

But again, nobody asked any hard questions - and while the talk nibbled
around the edges of the tradeoffs with using machine learning techniques
on this kind of data, it didn't go into any depth at all about which
ones they've tried and failed at. It's a technical talk, but it's not a
DETAILED talk in the sense of "Here's some outliers that show us where
we fail and where we succeed and perhaps why".

That said, if you don't have a plan to do this sort of thing, then
you're probably failing at some level, so worth a watch. :>

-dave


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